


Not in Knightsbridge Anymore

by executrix



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, X-Men (Movies)
Genre: AU, Crossover, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-07
Updated: 2011-05-07
Packaged: 2017-10-19 02:12:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/195720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A grief-stricken Willow applies for a job as a supervillain. For reasons not involving yellow crayons, it doesn't work out that way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not in Knightsbridge Anymore

_Well, you've got your diamonds,  
And you've got your pretty clothes,  
And the chauffeur drives your car—  
You let everybody know.  
But don't play with me.  
'Cos you're playing with fire_

 _But I lost my faith in the world,  
Honey, when I lost you._

 **Brotherhood of Mutants HQ**  
Initially, Magneto was not particularly impressed with his new recruit. A simple bottle of gasoline and a humble Tampax can make quite a showy fireball, and the combination eats less than a teenage mutant. But beggars can't be choosers, and he needed every Evil wannabe he could get.

As for every wannabe he could get his hands on: at first glance, he thought that John was, like the telegraph boy that Oscar Wilde didn't kiss, "a particularly plain boy." Then, one wet Wednesday morning, he decided that John didn’t look so bad after all. A few weeks later, after a memorable session with John and Mystique in the guise of early-period David Bowie, Magneto realized that John himself meant even less to him than quite a few other pliable boys. He was chasing a memory (it wouldn’t be the first time). Possibly chasing a ghost (and nor would that).

 **London, A Long Time Ago**  
Backstage, Erik looked down at the boy on the mattress—who, unlike Hamlet, was blasted with Ecstasy—and who sent a mixed message: long, tangled fairish hair and a ruffled paisley shirt, over a board-stiff pair of jeans and motorcycle boots. A seal ring on his left hand, a silver skull ring on his right. A mer-Brando. Fingertips callused from practicing, to slight avail. He was a terrible bassist in a terrible band. And, tragically, it wasn’t even the worst one at the gig. Erik began to wonder whether he had grown too old for all this. There were other shopfronts. Art students, for example: their paintings were only metaphorically strident and didn’t make noise. They had long hair and tight velvet jeans and a splash or so of acrylic paint didn’t go amiss on a run of smooth skin.

It was a cold wet night and, although he was decades away from starving and freezing, decades away from being at the pointed end of murder and not the broad dull one, Erik still luxuriated in his cashmere overcoat. In knowing that even if he ruined it tonight, replacing it would be as trivial as pulling another paper handkerchief out of the box.

"Have you got a name?" Erik asked, his hand jammed between the boy's legs. "Or is it a case of 'Edgar I nothing am?'"

The boy blinked in surprise. "Ripper," he said. "I'm called Ripper."

"By anyone you haven't paid for the privilege?"

 **Brotherhood of Mutants Headquarters**  
"Hello?" the red-haired girl with the widow's peak said. She wore a baggy blue sweater, (the sleeves far too long for her arms, with a bit of snipped black ribbon pinned right below the boat neck), over a skirt that trailed into mermaid tails of green gauze. Striped tights, Doc Martens re-threaded with peppermint ribbons. “We’re gonna destroy the world, and I’m here to help you. Well, I’m here for you to help me. For us to help the Cult of Proserpexa. We haul up a temple—no, it’s just one, not one to daven in and one the world wouldn’t be caught dead in—and, then, BOOM!”

“And why, young Miss, would I want to have anything to do with you? For that matter, why would I want to destroy the world in the first place?” Erik, not unreasonably, asked. He hadn’t invited her. Obviously there had been a security breach that would require some tiresome body disposal. He envied his old friend Xavier the warmth of being willingly served, not surrounded by a clashing, ignorant army of varying mercenaries, sadists, psychopaths, and power addicts.

“Cause we’re alike. Y’know, we've got the hat trick," she said, counting off on her fingers when he looked confused, "The three-fer. We're Jewish, we're gay, and we're mutants. I mean, not everybody you encounter can say the same, no **sir**. And on top of that, we’re super-villains. That’s a four-bagger. A Homo run."

 _This will last out a night in Russia, where the nights are longest_ he thought. “Well, I can dominate metal,” he said. “What can **you** do?”

“I’m the most powerful Wicca in the world.”

“Clearly not the most powerful grammarian, and in any event, that’s not a mutation. It’s a hobby, like sudoku. Not can I detect any villainy in you, other than aesthetic sins.”

Willow aimed the pout ray at him, but he withstood it.

"Well, I murdered someone horribly," she said. "That's pretty hard-core, isn't it?"

"I'm overwhelmed," he said. 'Help, help don't hurt me.' Is that good enough for you?”

"But it was, you know, take-out Chinese vengeance. In the white cardboard carton, with the wire thing on top? And, an hour later, you're hungry for power."

“Not an emotion to which I am entirely immune. But, quite apart from far too much experience seeking to prevent annihilation of any group to which I happen to belong, I prefer not to annihilate anyone who might have something I want, in case it goes up along with them. Have you really thought through villainy as a career choice, for example?”

“A villain killed my girlfriend,” she said, and for a moment Erik was touched by the real emotion within the cloud of bluster. “Then I should think that would dispose you toward virtue.” {{Although to consort with the virtuous is to risk being shut up for years at a time in a very large deal toy}} Erik thought. It was a metaphor that came easily to him, because it combined tombstones and money.

“They got to take her away, and she was everything When we were together, I was…she could see me. It didn’t matter that on Halloween, that one time, nobody else could, and I was afraid I’d be doing my Junior Year Abroad in secret disappeared school. Retrospectively, it didn’t matter. Because I had a reflection in her eyes. Everywhere else, I could just as well have been a vampire. Well, I was, that one time. Two times.”

“Girls are notoriously fragile,” he said. “They are easily killed with small household objects, or even by mere removal of food and warmth. I should not advise you to pin your entire Weltanschauung upon one, or even a series of them. And if you do intend to consecrate yourself to a vocation of villainy, then you are well off without her.”

Willow’s hair blackened and the marble-veins blossomed.

“A pretty trick,” he said. “I presume that this Roquefort is how you show you are angry? In my day it was necessary to invest perhaps a pound or two in a mood ring to do the same.”

“I can’t stand feeling all of everybody else’s pain,” Willow said. “I couldn’t even stand feeling all of mine. Xander once said he was tired of being everybody else’s butt monkey all the time. Well, I’m tired of being everybody’s tutor and confidante and reliable Girl Scout. Everybody can go fetch their own Thin Mints from now on. Time to side-kick ass and side-take names.”

“You really must clarify your motivations,” Erik said. “Taking away the pain of others is outside the remit of a villain. In any event, surcease is available from many media, licit and otherwise. You will need something more positive to justify the fatigues involved. I can recommend villainy on the purely hedonic level. If you have power—and I shall stipulate that you do—and if you are willing to use it—which, I perceive, is the sticking point—and if you are not lazy, then you can shape objects, and more entertainingly, other individuals—to your will and purpose. Shape them, use them, and discard them.”

Willow shrugged.

“But there is no purpose served if, in the course of discarding them, you discard not merely what might serve you in the future, but that future and yourself along with it. Want. Take. Have,” Magneto told her. “Now if you will excuse me, I wish to attend to another uninvited but rather more welcome guest.”

 **California Department of Corrections**  
Faith lay on her bunk (the bottom one) and tried to keep the thin, stale-smelling, crispy bronzed pages from falling out of the aged copy of “Vanity Fair.” At least before she could read them. (The novel, not the magazine whose namesake’s cover she had failed to adorn.) An ever-present air of PMS hung over the unit. Faith figured that it was because mostly everybody ended up there because of dope and/or murdering somebody they loved, so everybody missed somebody or something. She had never killed anybody she gave a shit about. That made her too hip for the room.

The light between the bars was cut off by the short, solid body of a Gomes, a not-that-bad screw. “Yo, Lehane,” she said. “C’mon. You got a clemency hearing.”

“I do?” Faith said. “First I heard about it. Do I get to wear people clothes?”

“Come as you are,” the guard said. “Handcuffs, that’s a given, but are you gonna go all Hannibal Lecter on me so we have to do a big shackle and tranq thing?”

“Swift,” Faith said. “’Cause, sure, I’d **tell** you first, ‘cause I’d think ripping out your liver was a good idea, but natch I wouldn’t **lie** to you. ‘Cause that would be wrong.”

“Bada-bing, Lehane. If the hearing doesn’t go so great, you can try out for America’s Funniest Lifers.”

{{I really must be slipping}} Faith thought, when they only sent one guy to get her to the car after they signed her out. He didn’t look familiar, and neither did his name badge. She followed obediently behind him—the Crown Vic was parked pretty far up the drive, close to the highway—until a bend in the drive out of view of the front gate. It was second nature to her to know where the turning tower on the roof pointed its surveillance cameras at any given moment, and when they weren’t, Faith threw her cuffed hands around his neck and tightened up the chain with a knee to his kidney.

When she let him go, he fell forward, gagging. She pistoned kicks (left! Right!) into his ribs. She immediately regretted this violent action. She was wearing rubber flip-flops, and her feet hurt like hell. He was down for the count, and she looked for a gun but he didn’t seem to have one, which she thought was hinkty. She also thought about looking for a handcuff key, but she didn’t really want to touch him, and she did want to get the hell gone before anyone noticed—and she thought it would be fun to exercise her long-dormant Slayer strength. So she found a waist-high spiked fence, wrapped the chain around an arrow, and twisted until it snapped.

 **Brotherhood of Mutants HQ**  
John added a couple of Ring-Dings to the cafeteria tray that already held a slice of cold pizza, got a root beer from the machine, and sat down next to Willow.

She looked up from the forkful of carrot-and-raisin salad she was rather contemplating than consuming. “If you don’t stop flicking that thing I will stuff it up your nose and pull it out your instep,” she said.

“Whatev’,” he said, offended but wrapping it in a sulk. “Just trying to help. It can get kinda lonely, when there’s nobody here younger than, like, a million. Or fifty, anyway. Y’know, at first I thought it was pretty gross having to put out for Magneto, except, well, he’s the boss and everything. And then that Rayne guy got here, and I got dumped, and for some reason that feels bad.”

The name sounded sort of familiar to Willow, but none of the raisins furnished any enlightenment.

“But you’re a grown-up, so I guess you’re gonna tell me to get over it, it’s not the end of the world.”

“No,” Willow said. “I lost my girlfriend, and guess what? It is.”

“You met that Mystique chick? She’s pretty cool. She can look like anybody. Dunno if you get to give people orders around here, but if you can, you could make her look just like your girlfriend. Mos’ def.”

Willow’s black eyes looked at him. He flinched, but she stopped herself before any more happened than that a thread of blood dripped from his nose and pooled on the table.

 **Pacific Coast Highway**  
Faith unzipped the orange jumpsuit, not just to make it look less obvious, but to attract a little attention from some bozo she could ‘jack. Her utility bra wasn’t helping with the seductive vibe, so she ripped the straps from their buckles, swung the band around to unhook the front, threw it down on the highway, and kicked its bleached-out saggy cadaver away. She breathed deeply and stretched her shoulders.

Moments later, a gray-blue Saab pulled over. {{Yessss!}} Faith thought for a fraction of a second, as the driver popped the door open and she slid in to the front seat. And then, {{Awww, frakk ME!}} she thought, as she recognized the driver as Wesley Wyndam-Pryce. His well-kept shoulder holster gleamed, conspicuously black, over his white shirt. Of course the 9mm inside the holster was on the other side of him, and she wasn’t willing to bet that she could get to it before he could, or before the struggle could crash the car. And it was one of those cars where the passenger-side door wouldn’t open.

“Hullo, Faith,” he said.

“Not a coincidence, huh?” she said. She tried to work out if he was more or less courteous than other people she had tortured and then met years later, but she came up empty. Usually, if she did render anything extraordinary, the guy died.

“Well spotted, St. Cat’s,” he said. “There’s a dress of sorts in the glove box. Put it on, to deter any curiosity from passing cars, and then put on your seat belt. We can dispose of the jumpsuit later on.”

“Put on my seatbelt? What, so you can press a button and I’ll be locked in?” she said, shaking out the pale-blue t-shirt dress. She dropped it over her head, slid the jumpsuit under her ass and down her legs, and kicked it into a puddle with one flip-flop.

“Evasive action may be required. I’d be simply devastated if you went through the windscreen face-first,” he said. “Faith, for what it’s worth, you’re still a Slayer, and the Council is more than entitled to call on your services. And before you ask what’s in it for you, if you succeed, then there will, in effect, have been that clemency hearing that we used as a pretext, resulting in a full pardon for you. You’ll be free, to go on with your life.”

“After I ice somebody for you. Untraceable, and then you throw me down the sewer.”

“Let’s hope it won’t come to that,” Wesley said unconvincingly. “The coven in Devon…”

“What, has the pellet with the poison?”

Wesley blinked. “Yes, after a fashion. There was a confrontation between Willow and Rupert Giles—“

“I thought he went back to Swingin’ London with his tail between his legs.”

“Yes, but he’s back,” Wesley said. “He’s just arrived. The coven, an unusually powerful concatenation of powers…”

“Accent on the CAT, as in pussy, I bet. And the Council’s got its panties in a bunch ‘cause the girls ain’t playin’ their song.”

Wesley cleared his throat. “Became concerned about the immense yet unbalanced strength that Willow is able to muster. Her aura is so powerful that they were able to detect its disturbance—its **corruption** \--thousands of kilometers away. You see, her, uh, well, her partner died. Was murdered. Although it was hoped that she would cope with her grief in a constructive fashion and respond to the advice of her one-time mentor…”

“Fat chance, ‘cause, the G-Man was Buffy’s Watcher, and sorta mine, ‘cause, like, who ever listened to **you **, but Willow never had to punch a time clock.”****

 **“…Things didn’t work out quite as anticipated. Giles had to intervene after she brutally murdered the youth who killed her friend.”**

 **“There aren’t really all –that-fired many perfectly charming murders,” Faith said. “I mean, Martha Stewart never talked it up big. And not just ‘cause it isn’t enough work for her to think it’s interesting.”**

 **“…And when he went to admonish her, Giles was carrying…Willow **seized** certain Magics that were transmitted to him by the coven. The intention was to enable us to track her locations and actions. And that succeeded admirably. But…well…it seems that having access to so much additional power merely amplified the sorrow she felt. When she could feel the pain of all humanity, she decided that the only way to end the pain was, well, to abolish humanity as well.”**

“She can do that?”

“Yes, she’s strong enough.”

“Hey, the Well of Witchiness going dirty bomb! I’d pay to see that. I bet Ticketmaster sold out in, like, three minutes. But I’m, y’know, kinda fighting out of my weight class here. How’m I supposed to stop her?”

“We have every confidence…no, we have no confidence in you at all,” Wesley said, breathing quietly in the hope that Faith wouldn’t think to question his authorization. Well, if Faith managed to keep the world ticking over until the next crisis, Wesley looked forward to the Council coming to him, cap in hand. And if she didn’t…at least it would put the problem of Angel into perspective… “But we haven’t anyone else. Fail, and you’ll discover if they have sarcasm in Hell.”

“Betcha yes, that’s where it prolly comes from.” After a moment, Faith added, “Where’m I going? I mean, where is she?”

“Our intel is that she’s approached the Brotherhood of Mutants for help. Our liaison for mutant affairs, Dr. Charles Xavier, locates the Brotherhood’s headquarters in an island in the New England area. There’s a map in the materials we’ve furnished. In the back seat. And a plane ticket. L-A-X—that’s for your morals—to Logan.” {{And won’t it be interesting if he turns up}} Wesley thought. “I’m sure that it will be a pleasure to you to revisit your old home, go and look at family photographs, and so forth. If and when you succeed in your mission, of course. Ah, yes, here’s the airport exit now.”

Faith grabbed the duffle bag from the back seat. She kicked the door shut, and then hesitated. “Wes,” she said, “I’m, y’know, I’m sorry.”

“Yes,” he said. “I should imagine you are.”

“That was cooler when Han Solo did it,” Faith said, tucking the Massachusetts driver’s license (“Kara W. Loughridge”) and the cheesy $200 for expenses in the pocket of her new jeans (she wriggled into them, under the blue t-shirt dress) and clasping the ticket and boarding pass. It was a commercial flight, so of course she didn’t have a gun and she didn’t have a knife.

There was a newsstand after she passed security, so Faith bought some cunning munchkin toiletries, including a container of dental floss, and a ball-point pen. She felt better with the raw materials for strangulation and stabbing close by, although she liked the hands-on stuff better anyway. She also bought some candy bars, not because she particularly wanted them but because there were a lot more kinds than in Commissary, and she liked being able to choose.

Faith landed at Logan. It was a long enough trip that she couldn’t get her wish of arriving before she left, which she thought would have been incredibly cool in that possibly-dead-cat way. She went over to the counter where Wes assured her a car had been rented for Kara Loughridge (and paid for). Faith pitched a hissy fit at the clerk, trousered the cash refund, and took the shuttle out to the off-airport lot, where she stole a car.

As Wes had enjoyed, she felt antsy about being back where she came from. With the $200 and the car rental money (minus the cost of a tankful of gas—people can be so careless with their property!) and a billfold she lifted in the airport, she thought she’d be able to get an entry-level gun. Home is where if you have to go there, someone will sell you a piece.

 **Erik’s Bedroom**  
“Apparently this girl comes from Sunnydale,” Erik said. “That’s what she says, anyway, and I do not think she has much vocation for lying. Can we presume that your Rupert sent her here?”

“Not **my** Rupert,” Ethan said sourly. “You took him away from me.”

“Not when time runs forward only, Ethan,” Erik said. “I was quite done with him before you so much as met him.”

“Yes, but he wasn’t a virgin.”

“No more was he when I met him,” Erik said. “As you recollect those days, if you dropped a pretty boy into that milieu —particularly a tall one! I still recollect the sensation of rappelling up those legs--his virtue would last no longer than a filet mignon in a den of peckish lions. And he was an intelligent boy as well. Thoughtful. Musically untalented, but not entirely illiterate. That deterred many from keeping him, but it was not a deal-breaker for me.”

“Oh, I don’t care about **sex** ,” Ethan said. Erik smirked. “No? I should have thought that Viagra was your very most favorite super-power.”

“But in this case, There was nothing left for me to corrupt him with,” Ethan said. “You already had him meddling in the occult.”

“Nonsense. Those of us who are naturally gifted have no patience with the table-tipping of your sort.”

“But you showed him that there was something…OTHER. I wanted to show him. I wanted to lead him.”

“I doubt it. You are a natural follower.”

Ethan, miffed, flipped open the cover of the insulated carafe. There was no more coffee left. He pulled the cord that was supposed to summon a servant, and tried variants of “Mas café” in various pidgins over the intercom. Magneto had long ago learned that (much like Temperance horses led to water) you can summon a metal pot of coffee from the kitchen, but you can’t guarantee that the lid won’t fly open in transit, or that even coffee that arrives will still be hot. So, just as King Lear learned that he was not ague-proof, Magneto learned that somebody still has to fetch the coffee, but one perk of his commanding position was that at least so far, it was somebody else.

 **Cafeteria**  
Ethan sashayed in, in a painfully thin and sleazy azalea-strewn housecoat that must have been either basted together by coolies to retail for three dollars, or have blinded a platoon of nuns who contracted with a couture house. “Hullo, Ridinghood,” he said. The coffee urn gurgled. His tatami-and-velvet flipflops clicked.

“Oh, it’s you, from the costume place! And the candy bars! And, and, putting those horns on Giles’ head!”

“Oddly enough, I was just discussing the very opposite.”

“I don’t like you!” Willow said. “You’re, you’re a worshiper of Chaos and you got locked up, very rightfully I must say and I don’t know why you’re here and not, as previously mentioned, locked up…”

“Yes, it did take quite a while, for loving little hands to craft my very own pardon out of pine cones and hot glue And then, once I was free and at loose ends, I came here to spend some time with an old friend.”

“…and you engage in meaningless acts of destruction,” Willow said.

“Whereas you are merely here to read the gas meter.”

“That’s meaningful destruction. Also, you were really mean to us.”

“You used to know Magneto?” John asked. By this time, his blood had dried on the formica tabletop, but he still pushed at it ineffectually with a napkin.

“Yes, I did, lad,” Ethan said, trying to remember which one John was—they really should have tags saying “Hello, My Power Is…”. “Evil’s a small world. Like publishing.” He turned back to Willow. “You lot were always trying to prevent the Apocalypse. For you to take it on yourself to cause it…well, that’s an own-goal that would have made the BBC blink when they were filming Blakes7.”

 **The Grounds**  
Willow teleported out of the building, not because she was in any great rush, but just because she could do it and she thought they’d be impressed. It had been several years since she last saw Faith, but she recognized her immediately.

“Well, there goes the neighborhood,” Willow said. “What is this, Sunnydale Lite? This is Your Life, Willow Rosenberg?”

“Hey, Dubya,” Faith said. “The Council and various good guys sent me here to talk you down. Kinda like Buffy with Jonathan. ‘Cause, y’know, I guess I should tell you that killing yourself is even more Last Year than cutting. But whoa, takin’ the whole planet along with you, just don’t.”

“Don’t mention that name,” Willow said, going into her idiosyncratic game face and knocking Faith down and about twenty abrasive yards down the lawn. “Because he was with Warren, and…”

By the time Faith struggled to her knees, wiping the back of one wrist against the trickling blood, Willow had wafted over to gloat. Instead of getting up, Faith pulled Willow down on top of her, and clutched tight.

“Huh,” Willow said, feeling the still-warm Saturday night special burn through Faith’s jeans and her own skirt. “Kill somebody, or just glad to see me?”

“Yeah, I maybe shot a coupla guards in the leg. But I didn’t kill them.”

“Why not? They’re going to be dead soon. Everybody is.”

“Because of what I found out from my last gig. Y’know what I learned? When you kill somebody, you can tell when they die. The exact, like, split of a second. Because you can feel something go out of them. But before you tell me how corny it is to think that their soul flies off and goes Poof, what I mean is, it isn’t somethin’ that goes out of them. It’s somethin’ that goes outta you. And, yeah, everybody’s gonna be dead eventually. But you makin’ ‘em that way, all at once? You’re better than that. You can be better than that.”

Faith wrapped her legs around Willow’s hips, and flipped them over, until she straddled Willow. “So, you’re walkin’ on cut glass here, but right now you’re hurtin’ over what was done to you, not so much over what you did. Which is the comparatively cozy part. And, hey, if it was a guy who went DeathWish on somebody for killin’ his girlfriend, nobody’d blink an eye. So if you keep it at that, the Council can fade the heat. And we can go on living. For a little longer at least.” Faith grabbed the neck of Willow’s sweater and ripped. “You want to know why I didn’t kill myself, knowin’ that I was gonna be locked up, what I thought was forever? Because I wanted to be alive. Alive is better.”

“Tara isn’t alive,” Willow said. “She’s dead, and I couldn’t bring her back. And if I could, she would be grateful. She wouldn’t bitch and moan about it. And she would love me back, the right way.”

Faith shoved her hand down the torn neck of the sweater, and cupped and squeezed. “Feel your nipple comin’ up hard in my hand? Jesus, Rosenberg, that’s ‘cause your tit’s smarter than you are. It can feel my blood running. It **is** your blood running that makes it hard. It doesn’t wanna hear “Game Over.” It wants to be alive and it wants my mouth down there.”

“And that’s the answer you have to offer? Sex?”

“Well, yeah, even when it’s bad it’s still pretty good. But not just sex in the out there, y’know, abstract. Anything that proves we’re alive, and we’re young, and we’re pretty, and **damn** wouldn’t lots of people want to be us? Or at least watch when I do this…”

She slid back just long enough to reach under Willow’s skirt, then lay back down, pinning Willow with the strength of her legs. Willow reached up for a tentative pat, and Faith congratulated herself on her own ass. Faith dipped her head and took Willow’s mouth, clicking accurately into place and stroking until Willow’s tongue sambaed with hers.

For a second Faith was kind of worried—gun issues—in that nagging way you do when you leave for a trip and convince yourself you left the water running and the oven on—and she certainly didn’t have the time or space to check. She told herself it was all right {{what kind of a fuckin’ moron shoves a gun in her pants **without** putting the safety back on?}} and she’d better get back on mission or shooting herself in the leg would be the least of her troubles.

Willow put her arms around Faith. Faith had one hand moving the soft sweater fabric over Willow’s breast, the other beneath her skirt. As they kissed, Faith rode Willow’s thigh. It wasn’t exactly getting the job done, and Faith could have done with Willow’s hand or her own hand inside her pants, but there definitely wasn’t time or space for **that**.

{{Well, if the world is gonna end now, at least I knew about it and all those other poor saps didn’t}} Faith thought. {{So that means I’m for the win ‘cause I protected them from having to know. But I’m the one who knows that it’s all comin’ down to right now, and right here. The whole world is hangin’ on, suspended on a red cunt hair. But that’s OK, ‘cause I got a real handful of ‘em.}}

Willow fell back, coming and crying, her head supported on Faith’s arm. “Alive. OK. I get your point. But it hurts so much.”

“Yeah,” Faith said. “Dead doesn’t hurt. But that still doesn’t make it a recommendation. ‘Cause there’s so much of it compared to how little of life anybody gets, so don’t take it away from them.”

Willow heard the coven’s summoning, spent a second agreeing to answer (thinking that it could be like SuperVillain AA—she wasn’t going to destroy the world **today** ), and teleported upward, giving a small wave until she vanished.

Faith sat up and stuffed Willow’s polka-dotted panties into the pocket of her jeans. “Huh,” she said.

John popped up from behind a hedge. “I guess we saved the world,” he said.

Erik strolled over, one arm around Ethan’s shoulder; Ethan’s arm clasping his waist. “You’re fired,” he said to John. “Faith, do you want a job?”

“Ahhh, bite me,” Faith said. “I could use a ride, though, if I can hitch on…dunno, helicopter or limo or private jet or rocket ship or whatever you got.”

“Very well,” Erik said. “Where are you going?”

There was some silence, and then Faith said, “L.A., I guess. I mean, not if I think they’re gunna put me back in jail, but otherwise…I don’t wanna stay here, no reason to be cold on top of miserable. But LaLaLand…it’s like, there’s less sharp stuff stickin’ into me there than anyplace else.”

**Author's Note:**

> A “deal toy” is a Lucite paperweight with a reproduction of the first page of the prospectus for a stock offering; they were status symbols in the 1980s. A tombstone, among other things, is a kind of advertisement for an Initial Public Offering of stock.


End file.
